It gives a subtle and natural tint to my lips thanks to its chocolate content. The color is not harsh or anything, but it is noticeable upon application, especially when my lips are a little paler than usual. At times when I don't want to use any lipstick or gloss, I'm really grateful for this balm.

Scent:

It's sweet, powdery and aromatic, just like good quality dark chocolate. No wonder though: LUSH claims that they use only the finest quality Belgian chocolate in their products. I can detect a slight orangey undertone too due to the orange and tangerine essential oils in it.

Taste:

It's sweet but I wouldn't say it's chocolaty. The balm contains honey and glycerin, both of which could be responsible for the sweetness.

Ingredients list:

It's pretty impressive, containing lots of beneficial oils and butters, and the oat extract is something I was very happy to find in the balm because I have a strange fondness for oat. That's probably because it did wonders for my skin each time I used oatmeal as a facial scrub... :-)

LUSH's Chocolate Whipstick does protect lips from the elements and does a good job at sealing in moisture, making lips soft, tinted and tasty, but it takes a long time for it to heal chapped, cracked lips, something which my beloved Alverde lip balm is much better at.

Cons:

Packaging:

It's cute and all, but LUSH's tin pots are a real PITA, and render the whole thing entirely useless when one is on the go all day. After all, what right-minded beauty-maniac would ever rub their fingers into the balm knowing that aforementioned fingers had been anywhere but a garbage dump that day. I mean we grab onto handstraps and poles on the bus and on the subway, we shake hands with people, handle money, pack away our groceries, and by doing so we come in contact with millions of bacteria every day. Now sometimes we get to wash our hands before we apply lip balm, but other times we only notice that we'd managed to lick the balm off our lips on a crowded street or on a jam-packed bus, and that's where tube packaging wins hands down. This was a major reason for me for switching to another brand.

I'm not sure that orange essential oil really belongs into a lip balm. When you want something to heal your lips you don't necessarily want it to contain something that could actually irritate them, because that would considerably slow down the healing process. I'm not saying that this is a major flaw but it made me wonder nonetheless...

Price:

in Hungary this balm costs the equivalent of 11.65 US dollars, whereas in the US it costs 7.95 bucks and in England you can buy it for £ 3.95. Beside the fact that this totally doesn't make sense to me (Hungary's GDP is much lower that that of the UK or US, which frankly means that people are much poorer here.) I find the price just a bit too steep for 10 grams of lip balm. It does last me about 4 months, but hey, so does Alverde...

I actually bought this lip balm several times back when I was a LUSH fanatic, but I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever buy it again. For one thing, it costs too much; for another, I'd probably buy from LUSH something that I haven't tried yet.